Mostly rural and remote smaller towns with older populations and large agricultural sectors

Ethnicity

Per Capita vs. Median Household Income (2010)

Presidental Elections Vote

% Empl. in Agriculture

Population Density (2010)

COUNTY TYPE

Tractor Country

Mostly rural and remote smaller towns with older populations and large agricultural sectors

These communities are truly small, often just a few thousand people, and the bonds in them are strong. They are the kinds of places where you know your neighbors well, where people notice when someone is out of town or if a different car is in the driveway. And when there is someone new in town the community at large tends to know about it relatively quickly. These are not communities that tend to draw in many outsiders. They don’t hold a lot of shopping, beyond groceries and hardware and there usually aren’t many places to eat beyond a few fast-food joints and family restaurants.

The Tractor Country counties are the most remote and least densely populated of all the county types in Patchwork Nation. There are more animals than people in many of these counties and they are often among the last to catch up on national trends – be they economic or cultural. There can be advantages to being behind the curve. Tractor Country counties, for instance, on the whole never experienced the housing boom of the early 2000’s, but they also never experienced the housing bust. In fact, Tractor Country missed out on a lot of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate consistently sat far below the national average even as the country struggled.

This part of America, already sparsely populated, is growing more empty.